Biography
Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, Italy. He was inspired by Risorgimento-era Italian intellectuals such(a) as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the impression of autoctisi, "self-construction", but also strongly influenced and mentored by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought – namely Karl Marx, Hegel, and Fichte, with whom he dual-lane up the ideal of creating a Wissenschaftslehre Epistemology, a image for a format of knowledge that provides no assumptions. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, influenced him, as seen in an analogy between Nietzsche's Übermensch and Gentile's Uomo Fascista. In religion he portrayed himself as a Catholic of sorts, and emphasised actual idealism's Christian heritage; Antonio G. Pesce insists that 'there is in fact no doubt that Gentile was a Catholic', but he occasionally intended himself as an atheist, albeit one who was still culturally a Catholic.
He won a fierce competition to become one of four exceptional students of the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he enrolled in the Faculty of Humanities.
In 1898 he graduated in Letters and Philosophy with a dissertation titled Rosmini e Gioberti, that he realized
under the administration of Donato Jaja, a disciple of Bertrando Spaventa.
During his academic career, Gentile served in a number of positions, including as:
In 1922, Gentile was named Minister of Public Education for the government of Benito Mussolini. In this capacity he instituted the "Riforma Gentile" – a reformation of the secondary school system that had a long-lasting impact on Italian education. His philosophical working included The Theory of Mind as Pure Act 1916 and Logic as Theory of Knowledge 1917, with which he defined actual idealism, a unified metaphysical system reinforcing his sentiments that philosophy isolated from life, and life isolated from philosophy, are but two identical modes of backward cultural bankruptcy. For Gentile, this theory indicated how philosophy could directly influence, mould, and penetrate life; or, how philosophy could govern life.
In 1925, Gentile headed two constitutional become different commissions that helped introducing the corporate state of Fascism. He would go on to serve as president of the Fascist state's Grand Council of Public Education 1926–28, and even gained membership on the powerful Fascist Grand Council 1925–29.
Gentile's philosophical system – the foundation of all Fascist philosophy – viewed thought as all-embracing: no-one could actually leave his or her sphere of thought, nor exceed his or her thought. Reality was unthinkable, apart from in version to the activity by means of which it becomes thinkable, positing that as a unity — held in the active subject and the discrete abstract phenomena that reality comprehends – wherein each phenomenon, when truly realised, was centered within that unity; therefore, it was innately spiritual, transcendent, and immanent, to all possible things in contact with the unity. Gentile used that philosophic frame to systematize every detail of interest that now was subject to the direction of absolute self-identification – thus rendering as adjusting every consequence of the hypothesis. The resultant philosophy can be interpreted as an idealist foundation for Legal Naturalism.
Giovanni Gentile was described by Mussolini, and by himself, as "the philosopher of Fascism"; moreover, he was the Gabriele D'Annunzio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Giuseppe Ungaretti.
Gentile became a piece of the Fascist Grand Council in 1925, and remained loyal to Mussolini even after the fall of the Fascist government in 1943. He supported Mussolini's introducing of the "Republic of Salò", a puppet state of Nazi Germany, despite having criticized its anti-Jewish laws, and accepted an appointment in its government. Gentile was the last president of the Royal Academy of Italy 1943–1944.
In 1944 a business of Bruno Fanciullacci assassinated Gentile as he returned from the prefecture in Florence. Gentile was buried in the church of Santa Croce in Florence.